The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
This extraordinary novel is worth buying for the introduction
alone. No kidding: you could read it and feel sated; you could read it and feel
redeemed—so fine, so telling is the prose. The introduction (some thirty-seven
pages short) offers not just a trenchant glimpse of the novel itself, outlining
and extolling the story, as it does, in some of the freshest, most surprising
language I’ve read in years, but represents a salient example of the deft, demiurgical
criticism for which the poet, Randall Jarrell (see photo below), was well if
less commonly known.
While titled The Man Who Loved Children, a facetious
reference to the man of the house, the vain, happy, puritanical, self-glorious father,
‘Mr. Big-Me,’ Sam Pollit, it is unquestionably around his wife, the neurotic, brilliant,
suicidal martyr of a mother, the ‘Great I Am,’ Henrietta Pollit née Collyer, that this astonishing novel
turns. As Jarrell himself remarks in his introduction, “…the book’s center of
gravity, of tragic weight, is Henny.” Indeed, remarkable as Sam and his daughter
Louise are as full-blown eccentrics in their own stupendous rights, they pale
in comparison to the “dirty cracked plate” of a woman and mother, the deeply,
darkly, monstrously empathetic Henny who haunts Tohoga House:
She was an old fashioned woman. She had the calm of
frequentation; she belonged to this house and it to her. Though she was a
prisoner in it, she possessed it. She and it were her marriage. She was indwelling
in every board and stone of it: every fold in the curtains had a meaning (perhaps
they were so folded to hide a darn or stain); every room was a phial of
revelation to be poured out some feverish night in the secret laboratories of
her decisions, full of living cancers of insult, leprosies of disillusion,
abscesses of grudge, gangrene of nevermore, quintan fevers of divorce, and all
the proliferating miseries, the running sores and thick scabs, for which (and
not for its heavenly joys) the flesh of marriage is so heavily veiled and
conventually interned.
To read of Henny’s life,
to follow (with an eye to form and coherence) her useless existential flailing
is to feel the fate of women and mothers everywhere, if in extremis ad infinitum—the smothered frustrations; the bleak,
inchoate rage; the grinding daily theft of autonomy, of self. She is “one of
those women who secretly sympathize with all women against all men; life,” she
knows in her bones, is “a rotten deal, with men holding all the aces.” She—clam-and-oyster
Baltimore belle, now wretched wife and mother—“shares helplessly ‘the natural
outlawry of womankind.’” It is through the sieve of her experience, through the
fractured lens of her madness, that the entire story is pulled. Yet to feel
sorry for her, to reduce her to an object of pity, is simply not possible. “There
is something grand and final, indifferent to our pity about Henny,” reflects
Jarrell, at one point in his introduction, “one of those immortal beings in
whom the tragedy of existence is embodied, she looks unseeingly past her mortal
readers.”
Strange
feeling, that.
Set in “Tohoga House” in
1940’s Georgetown, D.C., an overgrown zoo of a place with its teeming Pollit
family and their menagerie of rescued creatures, the ramshackle house and
garden is an American Eden run riot and abandoned by God—Sam, with his gluttonous
naming (or re-naming of everything and everyone) its exasperating Adam, the heart-scarred
Henny, its remote and bitter Eve.
The Man Who Loved Children is one those rare novels that seem to come out of
nowhere—starkly original, immaculately, miraculously conceived. You will never
read anything like it.
(Title
page of David Foster Wallace’s copy of The
Man Who Loved Children.)
Christina Stead, a lifelong Marxist, was the author
of over a dozen works of fiction and the recipient of the prestigious Patrick
White Prize. She was born in Sydney Australia in 1902, lived in France and
Spain and the United States, only to return to Australia where she died in 1983.
*The lead
image is a study by Swiss artist, Alberto Giacometti.
Peter
Adam Nash
No comments:
Post a Comment